Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God premiered last fall on HBO. It shouldn’t be too long now before the film, about the sexual abuse of young deaf boys at a Catholic institution, is available for streaming via Amazon, iTunes, Netflix, and/or Hulu. The reviews at Rotten Tomatoes and iMDB have been stellar, so here at Moral Compass HQ, we’ve added it to our watch list with a good deal of anticipation.

• Rabbi Yehuda Rosilio stole $130,000 worth of Torah scrolls from his own synagogue, and replaced them with cardboard-and-paper replicas.

• The former pastor of an Arkansas church, 42-year-old Hank D. Guilliams, is in jail, accused of multiple counts of sexual assault. Some of the crimes allegedly occurred in the church.

• A pastor in Jamaica invited the police into his church in an effort to quell rumors that his wife had been sleeping around. The service then erupted in “pandemonium,” according to the Jamaica Star.

• Pakistani-born Lord Ahmed, Britain’s first Muslim peer, caused an accident while he was thought to have been driving-and-texting. Although his sentence was postponed so that he could keep “building interfaith bridges,” that didn’t prevent him from going on a radio show and complaining the verdict was the result of a Jewish conspiracy.

• According to Human Rights Watch, there are at least 15 people on death row for blasphemy in Pakistan, and more than 50 people have been killed while facing trial for the charge.

• Indiana pastor Jack Schaap (55, photo) had sex with a 17-year-old girl who had been sent to him for counseling. He told her that Jesus approved of his advances: “Christ wants to marry us + become eternal lovers,” he wrote her in a text message.

• Muslim Mali, a new video game for would-be jihadists, features a button in the corner of the screen that reads: “There is no God but God, and Mohammad is his messenger.” Click on it and it sends a pulverizing black laser beam of death at the French enemy, courtesy of Allah.

• The FBI has apprehended a former Missouri pastor wanted on suspicion of child sexual abuse in New Orleans. George Spencer, 48, was arrested Friday on several charges of forcible sodomy of a child and child molestation.

• Jason Lee Ray, treasurer and youth pastor at a church in Tennessee, admitted to stealing money from the church from more than a year. He is thought to have taken more than $60,000.

• A retired Roman Catholic priest was given an 11-year sentence in a Newfoundland (Canada) court on Thursday for sexually abusing children. George Ansel Smith, 75, was sentenced for offenses involving 13 children he assaulted between 1969 and 1989.

• The deadliest mass killing in Orange County, Calif. history (Seal Beach, 2011, 10 dead) might have been God’s way of protesting the community’s treatment of homeless people, believes pastor Shirley Broussard. City Councilman Michael Levitt offered, however, that God wouldn’t kill a group of people just “because we didn’t pay for housing.”

• More details emerged in the Fairfield, Calif. sex-abuse case involving the Rev. Robert Ruark. Known by parishioners as “Father Silas,” Ruark was charged with more than 30 counts of committing lewd acts on children as young as 13 and, in some instances, photographing them while naked. The victims told detectives that most of the molestations took place either at the church or at his home.

• To prove that he wasn’t hungry for companionship or sex, a 59-year-old priest in Britain who is accused of sexually assaulting a teenage girl announced he had in fact been secretly married for more than a decade. William Finnegan claims he couldn’t have attacked the 17-year-old because, despite his vows of celibacy, he was enjoying a healthy sex life with his wife.

• Robert Lyzenga, a former pastor at Sunrise Christian Reformed Church in Lafayette, Ind., has been charged with five counts of child exploitation and five counts of voyeurism. He had installed small video cameras inside air fresheners in the women’s bathrooms at the church.

Always good to know who the real enemy is: killer “schvartze” (blacks), but most of all, mendacious, sex-starved kids. I’m not entirely certain that that’s in the Torah, but New York Rabbi Hershel Schachter is making it an article of faith anyway.

A top rabbinic dean of Yeshiva University has warned rabbis about the dangers of reporting child sex abuse allegations to the police because it could result in a Jew being jailed with a black inmate, or as he put it, “a schvartze,” who might want to kill him.

Rabbi Hershel Schachter, one of the most respected faculty members of the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, also said that children can lie and ruin an innocent man’s life.

Schachter’s warnings appear to be a response to reports about sex abuse at Yeshiva University — some of it involving another rabbi, George Finkelstein, who loved to wrestle. With his penis, apparently.

Yeshiva University has been embroiled in a mounting scandal following a series of reports in the Forward [a Jewish newspaper] since December about abuse allegations against two former staff members at Yeshiva University’s high school for boys in Manhattan.

Several former students have told the Forward that they were sodomized by Rabbi Macy Gordon, a Talmud teacher employed at the school until the mid 1980s. More than a dozen students have complained of inappropriate behavior by Finkelstein who rose to school principal before he resigned in 1995. Finkelstein was notorious for forcing students to wrestle with him in a school office and at his home. Several students told the Forward they could feel his erect penis grinding up against them during the wrestling sessions.

Other than the fact that these are images by artists with some serious (and most likely hard-earned) chops, what do they all have in common?

They are among scores of digital works that are being illegally peddled on eBay by a seller named bellasmomgodsway (for the sake of brevity, we’ll just call her GodsWay). She has them listed in an eBay section called ‘Direct From the Artist.’ Yeah. Not really the kind of ‘artist’ that the good folks at eBay had in mind.

Here’s one of GodsWay’s listings:

Pro photographer Stephen Oachs, who got that shot, wasn’t asked. He didn’t license the image to GodsWay, and doesn’t get a penny from the eBay sale. The same is true for all the other high-end image makers whose work GodsWay rips off.

You see, GodsWay scours the Internet for quality images, copies them with a click or two, and makes them “hers” by putting her watermark smack dab in the middle. Then she lists the stolen works on eBay, and delivers them (sans watermark) to the buyer, digitally. She’s done it hundreds of times, netting as little as a dollar for each sale.

The watermark she applies (it reads ‘bellasmomgodsway’) is an especially chutzpah-filled touch, because like all watermarks, it says “this is mine, respect my copyright.” Wow.

It goes without saying that this thievery is both immoral and illegal, but we’re supposed to think it’s OK, maybe because she has a seller name with the word God in it. And the word Mom. Oh, and the name of a little girl, her future adopted daughter. Is that enough apple-pie schtick for you?

How do we know about the adopted daughter? Because GodsWay tell us in the auction description. In all of her auction descriptions, actually.

I’m not a grinch, and I’m well aware of the monetary difficulties that adoption can inflict on a family of modest means. In the past decade, my wife and I adopted two absolutely awesome girls. They mean everything to us. With a good deal of financial pain (which we knowingly brought upon ourselves when we decided to adopt), we paid all our adoption-related expenses — get this — without resorting to petty crime.

Maybe an all-powerful Creator could get GodsWay to reflect on the fact that some of those expenses were paid thanks to my work as a professional photographer. I work hard to create my images; then I sell them, and I provide for my family with those sales. As a result, I find it ever-so-slightly galling when people invoke the Almighty to screw actual creators out of enough of our livelihoods that it may well affect our own chances of adopting another child — or of buying our existing kids meals, books, toys, an education, and so on.

A friend sent GodsWay a message via eBay, asking if she’ll teach her future child that the Bible says it’s cool to steal other people’s stuff.

We don’t have to worry about it much in the West, but there are dozens of countries where criticizing religion, or even just saying that there is no God, is a hazardous affair that can land you in jail — or worse. If you sometimes feel under siege for being an atheist in the U.S. or Europe, imagine what life is like for the folks listed below.

Today, March 14, is an international day of action to defend apostates and blasphemers worldwide. The organizers wish to highlight ten specific cases.

• Alex Aan, Indonesia: 30-year-old atheist, said on Facebook there is no god. Imprisoned.

• Abdul Aziz Mohammed Al-Baz (also known as Ben Baz), Kuwait: Blogger and atheist, jailed, charged with blasphemy (that’s him in the picture).

From the mid seventies to the early eighties, Argentina was politically wracked by a military junta that had illegally seized power from the Péron government in 1976. The generals, led by unelected President Jorge Videla, held on to the reins until 1983.

Thousands of people who opposed the regime were murdered, a purge that Videla deemed regrettable but necessary to restore “Christian morals and values.” The dictator saw himself as a bulwark against terrorism, and he defined a terrorist as

…not only someone with a gun or bomb, but also anyone who encourages their use by ideas incompatible with Western Christian civilization.

Suspected dissidents could expect to be arrested or kidnapped, and taken to secret detention centers, where they might undergo torture

…with methods including electric shock, rape, simulated asphyxiation with water, and mock executions. They were left naked in cold wet cells through the winter, and were told their families would be killed if they didn’t tell what they knew.

Perhaps we will soon learn what Argentinian Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now the new Pope, did and didn’t do during those seven dark and terrifying years.

We already know this: The Catholic Church as a whole did not oppose the dirty war, nor did it publicly protest the treatment of any of the scores of left-leaning activists and intellectuals who were kidnapped, beaten, tortured and killed. In fact, the church did pretty much the opposite. It habitually offered Videla support and advice.

A relative of one of dictator Videla’s victims reacts to his sentencing.

Just last year, around the time of Videla’s long-overdue sentencing, the close ties between Videla’s goons and the Roman Catholic prelates who lent him a veneer of legitimacy was confirmed by none other than … Videla himself.

Argentina’s former military dictator said he kept the country’s Catholic hierarchy informed about his regime’s policy of “disappearing” political opponents, and that Catholic leaders offered advice on how to “manage” the policy.

Jorge Videla said he had “many conversations” with Argentina’s primate, Cardinal Raúl Francisco Primatesta, about his regime’s dirty war against left-wing activists. He said there were also conversations with other leading bishops from Argentina’s episcopal conference as well as with the country’s papal nuncio at the time, Pio Laghi. “They advised us about the manner in which to deal with the situation,” said Videla in a series of interviews conducted by the magazine El Sur in 2010 but published only on Sunday [July 21, 2012].

… confirms long-held suspicions that Argentina’s Catholic hierarchy collaborated with the military’s so-called process of national reorganisation, which sought to root out communism. In the years following the 1976 coup led by Videla, thousands of left-wing activists were swept up into secret detention centers where they were tortured and murdered. Military chaplains were assigned as spiritual advisers to the junior officers who staffed the centers.

On 15 April 2005, a human-rights lawyer filed a criminal complaint against Bergoglio, as superior in the Society of Jesus of Argentina, accusing him of involvement in the kidnapping by the Navy in May 1976 (during the military dictatorship) of two Jesuit priests. The priests, Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics, were found alive five months later, drugged and semi-nude. The complaint did not specify the nature of Bergoglio’s alleged involvement, and Bergoglio’s spokesman flatly denied the allegations.

Nothing came of it, but I expect that a tenacious investigative journalist can build substantially on the groundbreaking work of award-winning Argentinian muckraker Horacio Verbitsky, who explored his country’s Dirty War in books and articles. Verbitsky got several of the Videla regime’s henchmen to talk about their crimes. For instance, former navy captain Adolfo Scilingo, now serving a 640-year sentence in Spain for killing suspected leftists in Argentina, told Verbitsky that under Videla, “We did terrible things …, worse than the Nazis.” Scilingo pushed some 30 of his victims out of military planes flying over the Atlantic. Scilingo says he was so disturbed by his first death flight that he went to see a navy chaplain, Time magazine reported in 1995.

The Roman Catholic Church, long criticized for tolerating the military, responded last week with a veiled mea culpa chastising priests who may have condoned the “dirty war.”

Perhaps Father Bergoglio somehow managed to avoid this then-pervasive, nasty political maelstrom. Or he might have found himself in the middle of it — holding, as he did, a position of prominence within the very Catholic Church that collaborated with Videla’s junta at the highest levels.

As the brand new Pope Francis, who shepherds more than a billion Catholics and who is their final arbiter of morality, Cardinal Bergoglio should both expect to and beable to withstand a little scrutiny.

For the sake of the Catholic Church and its followers, critical questions about il Papa‘s past should have been raised well before his election today. If they were, within the conclave perhaps, the world is now entitled to the answers. If they weren’t, I’m counting on a few enterprising reporters to begin providing the facts in some detail.

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P.S. For another example of how the Catholic Church too often aids strongmen and dictators, going as far as to encourage oppression and murder, read Luis Granados’ spine-chilling account of the Spanish Civil War. The Vatican, the Spanish Catholic leadership, and Generalissimo Franco all egged each other on to see who could be the fiercest anti-communist. With the Church’s blessing, Franco accepted military aid, including operational support, from both Hitler and Mussolini. More than 100,000 people went missing in the Spanish conflict. In most cases, they were never heard from again. In the Spanish countryside, the bones of the victims still occasionally work themselves to the surface of their unmarked shallow graves, as if begging to be acknowledged.

The new Pope, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, opposes marriage equality (but of course). He is so fiercely against it, in fact, that he claims those in favor have aligned themselves with Satan:

“Let’s not be naive. We’re not talking about a simple political battle; it is a destructive pretension against the plan of God. We are not talking about a mere bill, but rather a machination of the Father of Lies that seeks to confuse and deceive the children of God.”

Sadly, he’s not quite as good at speaking out against non-fictional, plain-as-day evil:

Critics accuse him of failing to stand up publicly against the country’s military dictatorship from 1976-1983, when victims and their relatives often brought first-hand accounts of torture, death and kidnappings.

NOTE: Moral Compass is a compendium of religious wickedness. All alleged violators mentioned in our posts are innocent until proven guilty in court.

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PAINE AND JEFFERSON ON RELIGION:

"It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief that mental lying has produced in society. When man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime." — Thomas Paine

"It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are 20 gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." — Thomas Jefferson